British Literature
Mr. Hahm
August 2, 2007
COURSE DESCRIPTION, 2007 Academic Year
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
This is a course in intellectual history, as we explore the currents of religious and philosophical thought in the various periods of British literature, as they relate to surrounding social and political events. Now, don’t let that sound so ponderous to you; in your World History classes you’ve already touched on so much of the historical tensions we’ll be relating to the literature we discover in this course. So you already have a reservoir of outside knowledge with which to illuminate these texts as the spontaneous creations of men and women whose imaginations were impacted by the waves of immigration (and conquest), the new sensibilities, and cultural syntheses that shaped the great English literary tradition. By the way, this is one of the oldest un-interrupted literary traditions in the world, so let us approach it with some reverence.
It is also a course in the stylistic analysis of this literary tradition, and stresses growth in close textual reading. The critical reading journal will be essential in this last regard. This journal will also serve as the springboard for various types of discussion, small-group projects, and formal writing assignments. Finally, this is a course in writing skills, in which both multi-draft and in-class writing exercises will be graded according to rubrics and commented upon. Through individual writers’ conferences, students will be called upon to re-examine their work and strategize effective revisions.
Learning / Teaching Activities:
Small group and whole class discussions will help us discover and experience British literature in socially interactive ways. I’ll stress the social interactivity of these types of activities, so you’ll want to get thoughtfully involved in these safe and welcoming forums for shared discovery. I’ll challenge you to re-evaluate your views, and you’ll soon learn to challenge each other in the spirit of respectful and friendly inquiry. In fact, the audience awareness you develop here will be key to your writing assignments as well. All language communication is about your relationship to your reader or listener, and your relationship to other writers, past and present, who are trying to reach you. In addition to verbal exchanges in class, we will also have on-line discussions or chat rooms, through the turnitin.com program.
Small group project work. Your complex, multi-channeled learning abilities and personalities come into play with the visual arts, dramatization, and perhaps musical expressions of your thoughts about your reading. While these projects are intended as free-styled, fun activities, the focus is still on stylistic and thematic features of our reading, and that’s how they will be evaluated.
The critical reading journal (crj) will be essential to our close textual reading. By writing this journal, you will progressively sensitize yourselves to the subtler and deeper layers of meaning and tonality in the literature we read. The new and original insights gleaned through this critical reading instrument will provide harder-hitting literary critical arguments for the essays assigned in this class. The emphasis here will be in learning to pick out key word choices, images, and stylistic features in the text, and then to analyze them for their possible meanings. I know you’re past masters at discussing literature in terms of plot and character; now let’s get you to move on to implications of matters of theme. That is, let’s get inside the actual language of the text to arrive at insights about the human condition itself, the universal themes in these literary passages. In other words, let’s start reading like college students.
Both take-home, multi-draft essays and in-class timed essays will be assigned, and will be the main assessment of your learning and progress in this class. Through these essay assignments will argue your interpretations of the texts at hand, derived from class discussion notes, critical reading journal entries, and supplemental reading. All written assignments will be submitted to turnitin.com, the school’s widely accepted anti-plagiarism program. You are encouraged to write in the full range of writing modalities—descriptive, narrative, analytical, process-delineation—in these more formal expository pieces.
Creative writing assignments, particularly playwriting, will round out your self-expression in this class, and in the world at large. Last year, three of my students were finalists and one an honorable mention winner in the Chicago-wide Pegasus Players playwriting contest. You may write on any topic, and you’ll learn to incorporate into your play some of the stylistic features of the masters we study. And that’s not all: once you submit your play to this contest, you’ll be a published writer! Be sure to include that proud fact in your college applications.
Interactive homework assignments will call on you to team up with your parents or guardians on a short writing project. I’ll ask you to invite them along to plays we’ll attend at Pegasus Players Theater or other playhouses, and hash out your ideas about these most interactive literary events. I invite your and your parents’ suggestions for other interactive homework possibilities.